Mirrorless marketplace (September 2012)

I’m a numbers guy, so while I’m charging camera batteries, I like to go to Flickr’s camera page. I was intrigued today by the statistics related to mirrorless cameras. All right “statistics” (sigh) I know. And you don’t need to browbeat me about the skewiness of Flickr users, etc. I know. But as I say, intrigued.

I’m also always jumping in to assist strangers who are taking group shots, so that they can all get in the photo. While we were touristing in Europe this summer, I think that although Canon DSLRs were likely number one, the Sony NEX cameras were number two in the viewer assist photos. Again, there’s likely a skew there, but.

Flickr provides several dimensions – number of users, number of images, activity factor (an unrevealed algorithm to determine popularity) and provides a ranking number. This morning it seems that the relative popularity of mirrorless models is getting pretty high.

Although in decline, the Panasonic GF1 (a two year old micro four-thirds model – here’s a link to my review in The Star of the GF1 as a camcorder) has the highest number (322) of daily posters.

At Olympus, the E-M5 (DSLR) is number 1 (322 posters) and the micro four-thirds E-PL1 is second (236 posters).

Samsung’s numbers are overwhelmed by smartphones, so the NX10 (18 posters) ranks #15. I’ve been impressed by their mirrorless models, so I’m surprised they are not more popular.

Nikon’s J1 (101 posters) ranks #30, which is actually a surprisingly high number considering it’s a relatively new model and it competes against the D90 (3268 posters), one of the most popular cameras on Flickr.

Flickr categorizes all of the above as point and shoot models. The Sony NEX series are categorized as DSLRs. The top ranked Sony camera across all models in all categories is the NEX5N (322 posters). The NEX 5 (293 posters, ranked as #2). The NEX7 (183 posters, ranked as #7) and NEX 3 (122 posters, ranked as number 25) put Sony’s NEX series as the mirrorless leader, which coincides with the sales data that Sony provided at their launch event this week.

So with Panasonic’s GF1 and Sony’s NEX5N both at 322 daily posters, which is most popular? (And full disclosure here: I own both of these cameras.) As the NEX5N is relatively new, it doesn’t seem fair to rate by number of photos posted ( vs 2.5M), so let’s use Flickr’s Activity Factor: GF1: 27, NEX5N: 32 to decide.

And that’s enough for today, my batteries are charged, so let’s go out and take some photos at the Ukrainian Festival that’s closed Bloor Street and the Polish Festival that’s closed Roncesvalles. Two festivals celebrating kolbassa on the same day! I love Toronto!

I’ll try to update this data quarterly. Let me know if I don’t. There are also some interesting new mirrorless models on the way – including Canon who’s finally joining the crowd.